Posts tagged ‘Honey’

Bees spend the winter huddled together in their hives. Inside the hive, the bees move about slowly, eating the extra honey that they stored during the busy summer season, and buzzing their wings to keep warm. If a bee becomes too cold, it cannot move and thus, soon dies.

Before the end of winter, the queen bee begins to lay eggs again, and in the spring, all the busy activities of the hive are resumed. In warm climates, however, where there is something in flower the year round, honeybees remains active, making honey in every season.–Dick Rogers

It is a mistake to image that bees get readymade honey from flowers. The honeybees make honey from nectar, the sweet juice found in blossoms.

The reason bees make honey is that it serves them as food.

To make honey, the honey bee sips the sweet nectar from blossoms with its long tongue, and stores it in its honey stomach.

Inside its honey stomach the bee adds special chemicals to the nectar. The bee puts the treated nectar into a wax cell in the honeycomb, where it ripens into honey.

The bees that gather nectar also gather pollen from the blossoms. Pollen, too, makes good bee food.

The dusty pollen from the blossoms brushes off upon the bee’s hairy body. The bee scrapes it off with its legs and moistens it with a little nectar to make a clump, and then pushes it into pollen baskets on its back legs.

Bee pollen is sometimes called “bee bread,” and with pollen bees help plants bear good fruit and seeds. They help the plants by carrying pollen from one flower to another of the same kind. – Dick Rogers

The bumblebee is a large, black and yellow bee that buzzes loudly when it flies. Its name comes from the old word “bumblen,” meaning “humming.” Like honeybees, bumblebees, too, make hone. But we do not eat their honey.

Bumblebee nests are very different from those of honeybees. They do not build hives of honeycombs.

Bumblebees may make their nests in an abandoned mouse nest, thick tuffs of grass, or in hoes in the ground. Inside the nest, the queen bumblebee stores honey inside a waxen cell called a “honeypot,” which serves her as a reserve food supply during cold and rainy weather.

Bumblebee honey is almost as thin as nectar and will soon sour if not eater. Bumblebees are helpful to man – they carry pollen from one flower to another. Only the young queen bumblebees live through the winter to start new colonies. – Dick Rogers